Conversations with Neil Gaiman

Neil Gaiman (b. 1960) currently reigns in the literary world as one of the most critically decorated and popular authors of the last fifty years. Perhaps best known as the writer of the Harvey, Eisner, and World Fantasy Award-winning DC/Vertigo series, The Sandman, Gaiman quickly became equally renowned in literary circles for works such as Neverwhere, Coraline, and American Gods, as well as the Newbery and Carnegie Medal-winning The Graveyard Book. For adults, for children, for the comics reader to the viewer of the BBC’s Doctor Who, Gaiman’s writing has crossed the borders of virtually all media and every language, making him a celebrity on a worldwide scale.

The interviews presented here span the length of his career, beginning with his first formal interview by the BBC at the age of seven and ending with a new, unpublished interview held in 2017. They cover topics as wide and varied as a young Gaiman's thoughts on Scientology and managing anger, learning the comics trade from Alan Moore, and being on the clock virtually 24/7.

What emerges is a complicated picture of a man who seems fully assembled from the start of his career, but only came to feel comfortable in his own skin and voice far later in life. The man who brought Morpheus from the folds of his imagination into the world shares his dreams and aspirations from different points in his life, including informing readers where he plans to take them next.

• Language: English
• Publisher: University Press of Mississippi
• Release date: Sep 10, 2018
• ISBN: 9781496818713

Book preview

World at Weekend

Keith Graves / 1968

From BBC Radio ‘World at Weekend,’ August 1968. Reprinted by permission.

Keith Graves: What is Scientology?

Neil Gaiman: It is an applied philosophy dealing with the study of knowledge.

KG: Do you know what philosophy is?

NG: I used to, but I’ve forgotten.

KG: Who told you that meaning of Scientology?

NG: In clearer words, it’s a way to make the able person more able.

KG: What does it do for you—Scientology—does it make you feel [like] a better boy?

NG: Not exactly that, but when you make a release you feel absolutely great.

KG: Do you get what you call a release very often, or do you have this all the time?

NG: Well, you only keep a release all the time when you get Clear. I’m six courses away from Clear.

KG: You’re on a particular grade are you?

NG: Well, I’ve just passed Grade I; I’m not Grade II yet.

KG: What is Grade I?

NG: Problems Release.

KG: And what does this mean to you, Problems Release?

NG: It helps you to handle quite a lot of problems.

KG: What problems do you have as a little boy that this helps you with?

NG: Only one big problem.

KG: What’s that?

NG: My friend Stephen.

KG: Oh, I see. Is he a Scientologist?

NG: Yes.

KG: He is? But I mean, how does this grade that you’ve got, Problems Release, help you to deal with Stephen?

NG: Well, you know, I’ve dealed [sic.] with every single problem except Stephen, one thing Problems Release can’t help me to handle.

KG: So you still fight with Stephen?

NG: It’s more of a question he fights with me.

KG: He’s older than you, presumably.

NG: Yes.

KG: And he’s three grades ahead of you?

NG: In a way, but you see, there are six main courses; but there are ever so many in-between courses. I’ve just finished three, and that’s Engrams.

KG: What are Engrams?

NG: Engrams are a mental image picture containing pain and unconsciousness.

KG: And what does this mean to you?

NG: Well, shall I tell you?—I’ll give you a demonstration. You’re walking along the street, and a car hooted and somebody shouted, shooo, and a dog barked, and you tripped over a bit of metal and hurt your knee. Three years later, say, you were walking along that same place and someone shouted shooo, and a car hooted, and a dog barked, and suddenly you feel pain in your knee. I’ve had one Engram that I can remember. I was jumping off the television set. We’ve got a gigantic television set, but it doesn’t work. Onto my mom’s bed and, you see, I jumped and I hit my head on the chandelier, and you know it really hurt; and I looked up and I saw it swinging, and a few minutes later I tried to test an Engram, so I set it swinging and I looked up there, and I suddenly had a headache.

KG: And how old were you when this happened?

NG: Around three months ago.

KG: Oh, I see. How long have you been studying Scientology?

NG: I started at five, now I’m seven.

KG: Seven years old. Extraordinary, isn’t it?

The British Invasion: Alan Moore

Neil Gaiman / 1987

The British Invasion: Alan Moore Interview by Neil Gaiman, American Fantasy V.2 #2 © copyright 1987 by Neil Gaiman. Reprinted by permission.

Many horror readers may not know Alan. He writes comic books. But what comic books! His latest series for DC Comics, Watchmen, has been heralded by London’s Time Out as a … phenomenon … a legitimate novel … the first series in nearly thirty years to assume that comic reading doesn’t stop with the advent of adolescence.

His forte is revitalizing old characters who are drowning in their own clichés. He approaches these comic book characters as if they were ordinary people with real thoughts and emotions. He brings contemporary horror and suspense writing techniques to a medium traditionally reserved for quick philosophizing between fist-fights.

This interview was conducted in Britain by Neil Gaiman over the last few months.

♦ ♦ ♦

What do the following have in common: A huge, green, animated heap of bog muck, used to explore issues of sexism, racism, and the dumping of nuclear wastes?

A world on the brink of nuclear war, in which a lone, crazed vigilante tries to find out who, if anyone, is killing his old business partners?

Two alien juvenile delinquents, who, in their passion for thermonuclear weaponry and mindless destruction, make the Young Ones* look boringly stay-at-home?

A sensitive portrayal of a young woman caught up first in a future society with no hope, then recruited as a soldier in a war she can never win?

There is more than one answer. They are all products of the fertile mind of Alan Moore; they have all won awards and critical respect; and they are all comic-strips, respectively, Swamp Thing, Watchmen, D.R. and Quinch, and The Ballad of Halo Jones.

Alan Moore is a phenomenon; a six-foot-two inhabitant of Northhampton, long-haired and bearded, who would look somewhere between a remnant of the Sixties and a Yeti were it not for his penchant for expensive suits and leopard skin shoes, and for the look of humor and intelligence in his deep-set eyes.

He is a superstar in a field—comics—in which fame, fortune, and artistic credibility would have been unthinkable a few years ago. He isn’t even an artist. He’s a writer.

Suddenly, comics are hip. They’re in. Kathy Acker raves about Moore’s Swamp Thing in print; Malcolm McLaren, trend Svengali, has just hired Alan Moore to write a film script for him (Fashion Beast, somewhere between the life of Christian Dior and the story of Beauty and the Beast).

Moore is a perceptive and voracious reader with an almost photographic memory who has become, after seven years of writing comics, an overnight success …

"I left school at the age of seventeen, and my first job was hacking up sheep carcasses for the Co-op Hide and Skin Division. It certainly gave me an insight into life, because we had to turn up at 7:30 A.M., and drag these blood-stained sheep carcasses out of these vats of freezing cold water, blood, and various animal by-products. Then we used to mutilate them in a variety of strange ways … but oddly, a form of concentration-camp humor arose, and many was the happy hour that we had, throwing whacked-off sheep’s testicles at each other. It doesn’t sound that funny, out of context. Y’had to be there, I suppose…

"Then I started as a toilet cleaner, which seemed to be more my line, and I’ve worked my way down since then, eventually ending up as a comics writer. Somewhere along the line, back when I was a teenage werewolf, the arts lab movement was spreading. Small cells of people who’d do poetry readings, concerts, magazines, and theatre; everybody who joined the group would learn a little bit of what everybody else was doing—it was great. It wasn’t a formal artistic training, but it was influential.

"Northhampton, where I live, is a small, dark, grimy town. A friend of mine described it as the ‘Murder Mecca of the Midlands’—we have a fantastic number of completely bizarre murders up there, and they’re different from murders anywhere else, because they’re more warped. You get headlines in Northhampton papers like, ‘Vampire Killer Gets Life’ and it’s true! A boring town with a lot of evil shit going on. And a very small Bohemian intelligentsia, only four of us, and we all know each other."

So how did he wind up writing comics?

"Getting into comics for me was a matter of going round the back, poisoning the dogs, and climbing the fence. I didn’t go into it the route that people normally do, in that I didn’t go straight into writing comics. I had a period of two or three years when I had delusions of adequacy as an artist, and I started drawing a strip for Sounds, writing and drawing it every week. First a Private Eye parody, called Rosco Mosco, then a SF comedy, and then—having done it for a couple of years—I was forced to the terrifying conclusion that I couldn’t actually draw. However, I had learned an awful lot about telling a story during that time—how to get the pictures to move in sequence, and all the other things you find out, and I realized that I could write faster, write better, and make a lot more money writing than I could drawing. So I started sending sample scripts in to things like 2000 AD and after a couple of tries I got some accepted, and I’ve worked my way up from there."

After working on 2000 AD and the short-lived Warrior (of which more anon) Alan turned his talents across the Atlantic to work on the horror comic, Swamp Thing. It was a comic sunk in the bog of mediocrity, but Alan soon began to take it places that no horror comic had gone before, and attracting an audience that usually did not read comics.

Swamp Thing at its best was an Eighties Horror Comic, cerebral, and scary horror in the Clive Barker, Ramsey Campbell tradition, in which a heap of bog muck is the most human character in a Louisiana populated by underwater vampires, zombies, menstrual werewolves, and serial killers. It was the first intelligently written comic to be seen in America for many years. The early Alan Moore-written issues now fetch as much as $25.00, the first time that the writer of a comic, as opposed to an artist, has ever made a difference to the collector’s market.

What did he do that was so different?

"I think it’s mainly in terms of the way I put things together. I did things to the character that, in terms of his history, were quite startling. But the main thing I did was to bring a different sensibility to it.

"The way I tend to approach comics is, there’s no reason to think of them as just for kids. The fact they’ve got stuck in a children’s ghetto is not entirely their own fault, it’s just that from their inception they’ve been regarded as children’s entertainment and nothing more.

"When I write comics I try to write them as if I were writing a book for adults, or a film, or TV and try to get the same kinds of concerns and sensibilities into it. So when I took over Swamp Thing I tried to make the stories more credible—which is a bit difficult when you’re dealing with a huge animated mound of bog-muck. But you get round that by making the stories talk about real, relevant, social issues that will mean something to the reader, instead of having an endless succession of people in skin-tight costumes wrestling with each other (sure it’s fun, but not anything to base an art-form upon).

So I’ve tried to do stories dealing with nuclear waste, feminism, all sorts of things. Keeping it well away from the Batman syndrome of an endless number of bizarre and improbable villains wanting to take over the world, and equally as bizarre heroes trying to stop them. I wanted to do something more intense, that would put the wind up people a bit.

After just eight issues with Alan at the helm, Swamp Thing lost the Approved by the Comics Code Authority seal from the cover—the seal that guarantees purity from corruption for American Youth.

"Well, for anyone who doesn’t know what the Comics Code is, back in the fifties, when America was in the throws of all kind of witchhunts, a man called Frederic Wertham produced a book called Seduction of the Innocent. He said that disturbed kids he had treated had all read comics at some time or the other, so therefore they were disturbed because they read comics—he could probably have drawn the same conclusions about milk.

"He reprinted panels from comics out of context: one, for example, showed a tight close-up of Batman’s armpit, so it’s just a triangle of darkness—Wertham managed to imply that this was a secret picture of a vulva the artist had put in to titillate his younger readers. Reading Batman must have been an endlessly enriching erotic experience for Wertham … I mean, if you can get that much out of an armpit!

"As a result of the book, the comics publishers imposed a code of practice on themselves, and the result was the little white sticker in the top corner of comics. It was like The Dick Van Dyke Show, where he and Mary Tyler Moore not only had to sleep in separate beds, they also had to have a table lamp and a table in between, y’know?

"In comics, female characters couldn’t have breasts any more, (although admittedly, before the code certain women characters would literally not have been able to stand up) there was no sex, violence vanished completely. So the good comics and the bad were stamped out together.

"Now when I started doing Swamp Thing, I decided I’d just ignore the code and let them slap me into line, rather than try to second-guess them. So when we got to issue 29, and the theme of the issue was incest and necrophilia, (apparently still frowned on in America, although they’re part of the social fabric over here) we did the story in such a way that anyone not old enough to have understood the concepts would not have understood the comic, it was written very subtly.

"But we did have a double page spread of five rotting zombies attacking a girl.

"Now, apparently the Comics Code Authority are just a bunch of old people who sit in a room and thumb through comics all day, at an amazing speed. And if they don’t see any mammeries or four-letter words, they assume it’s all OK. So they thumb through Swamp Thing, get to this scene, and immediately have coronaries, and the breather team outside the door have to come in to give them a heart massage.

"They said, ‘This is horrible!’ so they went back and read it very carefully, discovered it was all about incest and necrophilia, and said, ‘We cannot allow this comic to go out on the stands.’ So DC, in a move for which I shall forever salute them, said ‘Alright, put it out without the seal.’

"And they did.

"And nothing happened. The code is a toothless anachronism. Swamp Thing is still on the newsstands, it’s extremely violent and horrible, nobody’s said a word, and frankly, I wouldn’t expect them to. We’re just carrying on."

How about Warrior?

"The original idea for Warrior was that the creators would be getting less money up-front, but that we’d be getting complete control and creative freedom to do what we wanted to do. We’d have copyright control, a share of the merchandising (if there was any) … it was good, it made you feel more honorable and less like someone who was turning out writing and drawing by the yard.

"You see, comics in the UK are a long way behind other industries in the way that creators are treated—everything is bought outright, for very little money. If they made Judge Dredd: The Movie, for example, the writers and the creators would get no money. It’s a criminal set-up, but it’s something you’ve got to work within if you want to work at all.

"Unfortunately the things we were promised on Warrior didn’t turn out to be the things that were delivered. The creative freedom was only gotten after a lot of arguments with the editor; the money we were promised never materialized; there were personal problems. Like a lot of good ideas before it, the creative people got alienated. But we did get a chance in the twenty or so issues it endured, to do stuff that we enjoyed doing.

"I did three strips for Warrior, one called Marvelman," (renamed Miracleman in US reprints due to threats from Marvel Comics) "a revival of a 1950’s character—a really endearingly stupid superhero. I decided to bring him back in a really harsh, urban environment. He’s married, he’s forty, he’s paunchy, he can’t remember his magic word.

"I felt it touched on aspects of the superhero that hadn’t been touched on before.

"Then there was V for Vendetta—it’s one of my favorite things I’ve done. It’s set in the near-future, in around 1997, when Britain is under a very tight right-wing government and everyone hates the police (I know, you’ll find that very hard to believe!). And set against this bleak world we have a character who dresses up as Guy Fawkes.

"In the first issue he blew up the Houses of Parliament, and we’ve been working up to a climax since then. That’s gone down quite well—there’s obviously a place for a deranged, urban terrorist in the hearts of today’s comics readers.

"The other strip we did was a thing called The Bojeffries Saga. I really liked it—it’s one of the few comedy strips I’ve done. It’s basically about a family of mutants living in an unnamed urban mass—possibly Birmingham, possibly Northhampton—and me and the artist, Steve Parkhouse, have been trying to get the feel of the really stupid bits of England we can remember from when we were kids.

"Like you see the same motorbike propped up on four bricks without any wheels on your way to work each morning, and you don’t know why it’s there. And you pass factories and you don’t know what they do in there, and you suspect the people who work there don’t know either. So we boiled all this down into a fantasy on the British landscape in which we set these various werewolves and mutants. In a funny way it’s a lot more personal than a lot of the strips I’ve done.

"Although Warrior’s gone down the tubes, all the strips will eventually be appearing in different formats in American editions, since I’ve been snapped up as part of the brain drain."

Encouraged by the success of Swamp Thing, DC gave Moore and British artist Dave Gibbons complete artistic freedom to create Watchmen, a 12-issue graphic novel about a world much like our own, but in which ‘superheroes’ actually exist (they won the Vietnam war; Nixon is still president; nuclear armageddon is just around the corner). It’s state of the art stuff.

As literary critic John Clute explained, "Watchmen is the first comic to take the icons, the material of the superheroes and fantasies that have built up around them and make them a legitimate part of fictional discourse about America. It’s the first time a novel—and make no mistake, Watchmen is a legitimate novel—has been written that assimilates these grotesque childhood fantasies into an adult model of the state of the US and its future."

The world of Watchmen is much like our own. But in the thirties a few people, for their own reasons, began wearing masks and fighting crime. Then in 1960 the superman was created, and he was American. And the world has never recovered. By the 1985 we are presented with, nuclear armageddon is looking likely.

As Moore explains: "If you actually talk about the world in which we live at the moment, you are going to run into a lot of emotional feedback. You are going to run into people’s emotional feelings about political issues. If I were to do a comic that slagged off Ronald Reagan for an American audience (much as I detest Ronald Reagan, and would like to do that) it wouldn’t be a wise thing to do. The majority of Americans like Ronald Reagan, therefore only the ones that didn’t like Ronald Reagan to start with would read my comic. The rest of the people would switch off.

"The beauty of Watchmen—and indeed much comics and fantasy, if used correctly, is they don’t have to be escapist. You can use them to make a statement about the world without bumping up against people’s prejudices.

"In Watchmen, the president is Richard Nixon. You can say what you like about Nixon and nobody cares! So by having a parallel universe, in which there were just two Washington Post reporters found dead in an underground garage somewhere, you can depict this world, in which there are lots of wonderful things—electric cars, airships, superheroes—but the feeling of the world, the approaching feeling of doom and apocalypse, the feeling of disconnection, all these things are things which I’m obviously drawing from the world in which I live in. And by making the statement in terms of a world in which superheroes exist, and instead of the atom bomb unbalancing the culture, it’s the superhero, you can say the same things, get the same attitudes over while sidestepping people’s